Emily Blunt, Ewan McGregor Celebrate ‘Salmon Fishing in the Yemen’

It’s unlikely that fly fishing will become the hot extracurricular among the fashion set, but that didn’t stop them from coming out to the Crosby Street Hotel to celebrate the new film Salmon Fishing in the Yemen.

The film, starring Emily Blunt and Ewan McGregor, is about a sheik’s plan to bring fly-fishing to the desert—which means its leading man and lady had some unusual skills to develop on-set.

“I have to cast a fly rod in the movie, and I have to look like I know what I’m doing,” McGregor told FashionEtc. “And by doing that and speaking to the fishermen who were teaching me, I did learn about salmon. I mean, I didn’t learn the kind of knowledge my character would have in this movie, but at least I look like I know what I might be doing with a rod!”

For Blunt, things were even trickier. “The thing I did have to learn was to talk about fishing in Mandarin,” she revealed. Mandarin? “There’s a scene where I speak Chinese, and so the only thing I know is to talk about salmon in Mandarin. I don’t know how to say ‘how are you,’ but I know how to talk about fish, and water pressure, and stuff like that.”